Effective leadership entails the ability of a leader to influence other team members’ decisions, opinions, and thoughts. In strategic leadership, use of influence processes is imperative. An effective leader is one who is visionary and possesses the capabilities to realize his vision (Burns, 2012). However, to achieve the vision, a leader needs to be able to influence others. Influence is defined as a force applied to the individual(s) by leaders to induce change on the individual(s). Influence is a powerful tool since it can alter someone’s values, opinions, needs, attitude, and goals. Hence, it is a vital aspect of strategic leadership as it points out how leaders can impact change within an organization. Therefore, this paper elucidates the different processes a leader employs to influence strategic processes of an organization, and explain why the processes are essential.
Chief among the influence processes is the use of direct decisions. Leaders use this influence process since it provides them with the influential capability to change their team member’s choices. Use of direct decision is intertwined with control since leaders apply it to create company aspects such as mission and visions. Moreover, possession of such control is crucial to leaders since it provides them the capability to influence the issues affecting their subordinates through use of direct decisions.
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Another important influence process is the use of allocation of resources. Leaders exercise this process since they can control how the company’s resources such as monetary, technology, and human resources. Besides, the company can only function properly if the resources are available. Therefore, leaders can exercise their powers and allocate more resources to departments that are struggling to achieve the company’s objective as a result of lack or shortage of the resources (Rush, 2012).
Equally important, leaders may opt to reward employees in relation to their actions and behavior. For instance, use of monetary incentives boosts the morale of employees to work harder. In the long run, efforts from employees have an impact to job and performance satisfaction.
Also, leaders can employ role modeling to nurture and shape the behavior and opinions of subordinates. This influence process dictates the leader act as a role model to the employees. According to Burns (2012), research shows that the subordinate staff generally follows the path taken by the strategic leader. Lastly, the leaders can employ their authority and promote hardworking leaders (Porter, Angle & Allen, 2003).
Overall, leaders mainly use direct decisions, allocation of resources, incentives, and role modeling as ways to influence the strategic process of their organizations. Additionally, the leaders may also promote hardworking leaders in their organization as a way to influence
References
Burns, J. (2012). Leadership . New York, NY: Open Road Integrated Media.
Porter, L., Angle, H., & Allen, R. (2015). Organizational influence processes . London: Routledge.
Rush, S. (2012). On strategic leadership . Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership.
